Peppers with chick peas and gorgonzola - a Nigel Slater dish for February

Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched 'Dish of the Month' which involves choosing one Nigel Slater recipe per month to cook and then writing a blog post about it. 

Last weekend I was looking through The Observer and I spotted a a recipe called 'peppers with cannellini and gorgonzola' in an article called 'Nigel Slater's bright and cheerful winter recipes' (17 February 2013). 

This looked like a lovely way of making a light lunch with very little effort so I thought I'd give it a go. I actually made 'Peppers with chick peas and gorgonzola', because I prefer chick peas to cannellini beans.  

Here are the ingredients for two portions:

With the help of my little boy, I stuffed the peppers with a mixture of the cheese, mushed-up chick peas and chopped chives before cooking in the oven at 180 degrees C for an hour and a quarter.

This worked pretty well with chick peas, and both H and I enjoyed eating the end result for lunch today. The peppers were soft and sweet and the gorgonzola made a sauce in amongst the chick peas.

I will definitely cook this again soon.

PS I think my friend Emily who blogs at amummytoo will like this dish, so I'm also joining up with her Recipe of the Week linky.

Onion Soup Without Tears - a Nigel Slater dish for January

Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched 'Dish of the Month' which involves choosing one Nigel Slater recipe per month to cook and then writing a blog post about it. Nigel Slater is my favourite food writer, bar none. So when I needed no encouragement to join in with this.

The dish I chose to cook for January is 'Onion Soup Without Tears' from the January chapter of 'The Kitchen Diaries'.

The idea behind this recipe is to roast the halved onions before chopping them up to make the soup, thereby reducing the tears involved in chopping the onions. The recipe also says that the other advantage of this method is that the onions smell lovely while they are roasting.

Well I tried it and it worked beautifully. The roasting onions smelled mouthwateringly gorgeous. Even better, the finished soup tasted absolutely delicious with toasted French bread and Gruyere cheese on top. It was a real treat!

(Sorry the photos don't do it justice - will use a proper camera next time)

My first Slow Cooker Sunday

I want to do more home cooking but because I work full time it usually seems like too much effort. So I added a slow cooker to my Amazon wishlist and my dad bought it for me for my birthday.

The plan is that we can have a home cooked meal on a weekend day without spending the whole day in the kitchen.

Here is a photo of my new slow cooker in action:

The first dish we decided to cook was Chilli Black Bean Stew from Ultimate Slow Cooker: over 100 simple, delicious recipes by Sara Lewis.

There was a bit of preparation required (soaking the beans overnight then boiling them for 10 minutes, and the other ingredients were cooked for a short time on the stove before putting everything in the slow cooker) but after that it was a case of leave it on a low heat for 8 hours and resist the temptation to take the lid off before it was finished.

So what was the end result like? Well it was delicious. The beans were cooked to perfection and there was just the right amount of chilli to give it a bit of a kick without blowing my head off. We served it with rice, and it seemed like the perfect autumn comfort food.

So I think this method of cooking could be a good option for autumn and winter weekend meals. This particular dish was fairly cheap to make, and it was lovely to have a nice evening meal to look forward to without having to put much effort in during the evening itself. Plus we have a couple of spare portions to put in the fridge for tomorrow.

I'm linking up with this week's Slow Cooker Sunday at Mediocre Mum - check out what other yummy slow cooker food people have been cooking up recently.